Sunday, May 17, 2009

Pretty much exactly eight years ago, give or take a week or so, I received my doctorate from Catholic University of America, and graduated for the very last time. It was my third graduation ceremony--yes, I had previously walked for both my bachelors and masters degrees; as anyone who reads this site could probably guess, I'm often a sucker for big, ritualistic, community-wide events--and my favorite of the three. For one thing, it was held outside on the steps of Basilica of the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, which is on the campus of Catholic University of America, where I went to graduate school. It was a beautiful, warm spring day; there was green and flowers and just enough clouds on the sky to provide regular shade for all of us in our chairs. For another thing, I just loved the pomp of it all: the individual degrees awarded in separate morning ceremonies, and then the march across campus with us all in our robes, with some of us going up to the top of the steps, for our hooding. I loved that Melissa was there, and my parents made it out, and that my advisor made it back from a foreign trip in time to be there. And, last but not at all least, I loved the commencement address.

No, I'm not kidding--I'm the sort of person who listens to commencement addresses. I don't necessarily remember them, but I do remember this one. It had been an interesting six years for me, a Mormon graduate student at CUA*, and listening to Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, then the Archbishop of the Washington Diocese, was an appropriate way to wrap it up.

I'm thinking about this, as you might imagine, because of President Obama's appearance at Notre Dame's commencement today. I'll read through his speech with some interest later, perhaps tonight or tomorrow. I'm curious as to what he'll say, or not say. Will he mention the controversy that has attended his speech? Will he talk about abortion at all? My old CUA advisor, Steve Schneck, himself a Notre Dame graduate, has expressed hopes for the speech, hopes in regards to the extending of a "common ground" approach towards abortion reduction, an approach he sees reflected in official Vatican statements, rather than the scorched-earth approach favored by many American Catholics who have fallen in love with the culture wars. As for myself, well, not being Catholic, and more specifically as one who does not embrace the particular theological assumptions which drive much Catholic opposition to abortion, my own discontent with abortion rights is a much murkier thing, one which, despite my clear desire to see the practice made rare and even formally deterred as much as possible, perhaps nonetheless includes too many caveats and qualifications to really be of any use. Part of me wishes I could exercise the same sort of angry, contemptuous condemnation towards abortion that this post demonstrates. But for better or worse, that's not what I learned at CUA.

What did I learn? Well, too many things to list here, that's for certain. But one thing I did learn at that specifically Catholic place, and which I'd like to believe has stayed with me, with a minimum of doubts and obfuscation, is what Cardinal McCarrick reminded us all of at one pleasant afternoon in May, eight years ago: that we were, and are (all of us who live here in the United States, everyone who is able to obtain a college education at a good university) astonishingly blessed people, and hence have a moral obligation to remember those who are not so blessed. As McCarrick concluded his address (which is worth reading in full): "[W]e are all so very conscious that as you set out from this university you have so challenging an opportunity in today’s world. Make the most of it. Change the world. Don’t forget the poor. Don’t forget that what you do affects every corner of this globe. Don’t forget that perhaps the greatest lesson you have learned at The Catholic University of America is that God watches us and loves us and reaches out into our lives to make a difference so that you and I may make a difference too." I don't know if that's the sort of religious point that President Obama would ever be inclined to make, and I don't know if those sniffing for further fuel to continue their cultural conflicts would ever stop to listen long enough to hear such words if they were there, and maybe even give the president credit for voicing them if he did. But those were the words I heard, and I stood there, decked out in my dark robes and burdened by about $30,000 in debt, I believed every one of them. Still do. I hope those graduating from Notre Dame today can take away something similar to what I did; if they do, they can consider themselves blessed too.

*My favorite relevant anecdote from those years: once, for some reason that I don't remember, I needed to get a copy of my original application to the graduate program there. I looked over the typed-up, official version that they had on file, and I noticed that in the space asking about religion, where I had painstakingly written out, "The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon)," there appeared simply "Protestant." Now, I mentioned this to my advisor, and he just laughed. "You have to understand, Russell, that to us Catholics, everybody's Protestant."

Quotes

"Every one of the standards according to which action is condemned demands action. Although the dignity of persons is inevitably violated in action, this dignity would be far less recognized in the world than it is had it not been supported by actions such as the establishment of constitutions and the fighting of wars in defense of human rights. Action must be untruthful, yet religion, science, philosophy, and the arts, the main forms of absolute fidelity to the truth, could not survive were they unsupported by action. Action cannot but be anticommunal in some measure, yet communal relationships would be almost nonexistent without areas of peace and order, which are created by action. We must act hesitantly and regretfully, then, but still we must act."

(Glenn Tinder, The Political Meaning of Christianity: The Prophetic Stance [HarperSanFrancisco, 1991], 215)

"[T]he press was still the last resource of the educated poor who could not be artists and would not be tutors. Any man who was fit for nothing else could write an editorial or a criticism....The press was an inferior pulpit; an anonymous schoolmaster; a cheap boarding-school; but it was still the nearest approach to a career for the literary survivor of a wrecked education."

"Mailer was a Left Conservative. So he had his own point of view. To himself he would suggest that he tried to think in the style of [Karl] Marx in order to attain certain values suggested by Edmund Burke."

(Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night [The New American Library, 1968], 185)

"All those rely on their hands, and each is skillful at his own craft. / Without them a city would have no inhabitants; no settlers or travellers would come to it. / Yet they are not in demand at public discussions, nor do they attain to high office in the assembly. They do not sit on the judge's bench or understand the decisions of the courts. They cannot expound moral or legal principles and are not ready with maxims. / But they maintain the fabric of this world, and the practice of their craft is their prayer."

(Ecclesiasticus (Sirach) 38:31-34, in The Revised English Bible with the Apocrypha [Oxford University Press, 1989])

"The tendency, which is too common in these days, for young men to get a smattering of education and then think themselves unsuited for mechanical or other laborious pursuits is one that should not be allowed to grow up among us...Every one should make it a matter of pride to be a producer, and not a consumer alone."

(Wilford Woodruff, Millennial Star [November 14, 1887], 773)

"We are parts of the world; no one of us is an isolated world-whole. We are human beings, conceived in the body of a mother, and as we stepped into the larger world, we found ourselves immediately knotted to a universe with the thousand bands of our senses, our needs and our drives, from which no speculative reason can separate itself."

"'Business!' cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. 'Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!'"

(Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol [Candlewick Press, 2006], 35)

"The Master said, 'At fifteen, I set my mind upon learning; at thirty, I took my place in society; at forty, I became free of doubts; at fifty, I understood Heaven's Mandate; at sixty, my ear was attuned; and at seventy, I could follow my heart's desires without overstepping the bounds of propriety.'"

"Lack of experience diminishes our power of taking a comprehensive view of the admitted facts. Hence those who dwell in intimate association with nature and its phenomena grow more and more able to formulate, as the foundations of their theories, principles which admit a wide and coherent development: while those whom devotion to abstract discussions has rendered unobservant of the facts are too ready to dogmatize on the basis of a few observations."

"[God] does not want men to give the Future their hearts, to place their treasure in it. . . . His ideal is a man who, having worked all day for the good of posterity (if that is his vocation), washes his mind of the whole subject, commits the issue to Heaven, and returns at once to the patience or gratitude demanded by the moment that is passing over him."

"Money is simply a tool. We use money as a proxy for our time and labor--our life energy--to acquire things that we cannot (or care not to) procure or produce with our own hands. Beyond that, it has limited actual utility: you can't eat it; if you bury it in the ground, it will not produce a crop to sustain a family; it would make a lousy roof and a poor blanket. To base our understanding of economy simply on money overlooks all other methods of exchange that can empower communities. Equating an economy only with money assumes there are no other means by which we can provide food for our bellies, a roof over our heads and clothing on our backs."

"A scholar's business is to add to what is known. That is all. But it is capable of giving the very greatest satisfaction, because knowledge is good. It does not have to look good or even sound good or even do good. It is good just by being knowledge. And the only thing that makes it knowledge is that it is true. You can't have too much of it and there is no little too little to be worth having. There is truth and falsehood in a comma."

"I believe in democracy. I accept it. I will faithfully serve and defend it. I believe in it because it appears to me the inevitable consequence of what has gone before it. Democracy asserts the fact the masses are now raised to a higher intelligence than formerly. All our civilization aims at this mark. We want to do what we can to help it. I myself want to see the result. I grant that it is an experiment, but it is the only direction society can take that is worth its taking; the only conception of its duty large enough to satisfy its instincts; the only result that is worth an effort or a risk. Every other possible step is backward, and I do not care to repeat the past. I am glad to see society grapple with issues in which no one can afford to be neutral."